Two comics, but the same tragic story: CRAIG BROWN on the uneasy relationship between comedy and happiness

The comedian Sean Hughes was buried yesterday, dead at the age of 51. His fame rested on a television quiz show.

For 11 series, from 1996 to 2002, he had been a team captain on the panel game about pop music, Never Mind The Buzzcocks.

Two days after Hughes’s death, a friend, Michael Hann, wrote that Hughes ‘was torn between desiring fame and wealth, and contempt for the way he had achieved it’.

Hann thinks that there were times on Never Mind The Buzzcocks when the viewer could spot Hughes’s disdain for what he was doing.

Comedians Sean Hughes (left) and Kenneth Williams (right) were both victims of the uneasy relationship between comedy and happiness, according to Craig Brown

Another friend thought that Hughes, who died of suspected heart and liver failure, was one of those comedians who never come to terms with the facility with which they extract laughter from an audience.

‘All my friends are comics,’ added this TV colleague, ‘and so many of them have been ruined by quiz shows.’

By chance, two days before Sean Hughes was born, another comedian expressed the same sort of self-loathing to his diary.

‘The performance was mediocre,’ wrote Kenneth Williams, on Monday November 8, 1965, after appearing in a show in Birmingham.

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‘Suddenly it was all quite clear: I’ve done it again. Land myself in another load of mediocrity & no talent or technique around me to help me disguise it.’

For the rest of his life, Williams would remain contemptuous of his talent to amuse. Year after year, he appeared on endless chat shows and quiz shows, provoking the audiences to howl with laughter.

He would then go back to his flat filled with self-revulsion. ‘To Lime Grove for the Simon Dee Show,’ he writes on November 25, 1967. ‘I babbled on talking rubbish and came away feeling suicidal.’

On February 19, 1974, he appears on a panel show, but can’t bear to join the rest of the team for a drink afterwards.

Sean Hughes was buried yesterday after dying at the age of 51. A host of fellow comics attended the funeral at Islington and Camden Cemetery in London

‘The further you go in this profession the more you realise its utter hollowness — “the looking glass world” where the values are simply those of either fashion or the market place and little else matters at all.’

His descriptions of his weekly appearances on Radio 4’s humorous panel game Just A Minute also see-saw between delight and disgust.

On February 18, 1978, the chairman, Nicholas Parsons, has given him the subject of paper tearing. ‘I said: “I know nothing about this apart from doing it in the lavatory . . .” & there was a big laugh. Oh! What one will stoop to in order to make them giggle!’

When not turning on himself, Williams turns on others.

On November 9, 1979, he writes: ‘I lost my temper with idiot Parsons who said (after a sally of mine had no response): “Well, the audience didn’t think that was very funny, did they?” and I retorted: “And with what relish you greet the failure! You obviously delight in the defeat of a fellow performer!” ’

On January 17, 1987, he waits up until 11pm to watch a repeat of a television show in which he has starred.

According to a friend, Hughes, who died of suspected heart and liver failure, never came to terms with how he extracted laughter from an audience

Inevitably, he is disappointed. ‘It was a chastening experience! Time makes one objective & I saw ALL the faults. It was a self-indulgent parade of vanity. Unbelievable to see someone going on and on & imagining that it was all so fascinating. The sheer conceit of it was daunting to watch.’

He adds that watching it was ‘a deeply depressing experience which highlighted the over-weening arrogance in a persona fighting self-dislike to a point of absurd pathos’.

In that particular diary entry, he writes: ‘Oh! It is time to go.’ With hindsight, it’s clear that by ‘time to go’ he means ‘time to die’.

A month later, on February 5, 1987, he again see-saws between joy and contempt, the one naturally arising from the other.

After an appearance on the Michael Aspel chat show, he writes: ‘The audience was super!!!! My spot went v. well but of course I felt all the self-loathing over such appalling indulgence. With me it is verbal diarrhoea and while I’m gabbling on, another side of me is saying: “Oh! Dear! What an exhibition you’re making of yourself!”’

On April 14, 1988, Williams wrote in his diary of back and stomach pains. He concluded his diary entry with the words, ‘Oh — what’s the bloody point?’

And there his diary ends: during the night, he died aged 62 from a fatal — possibly unintentional — overdose of barbiturates and amphetamines, a victim, like Sean Hughes, of the uneasy relationship between comedy and happiness.